March 30, 2003:

The Big Truck comes the day after tomorrow,
and we're getting a little ragged here trying to get everything tied up
with a ribbon on it (or at least two stickers) before then. Last night
I changed over to Poco Mail, because a new onslaught of spammer domains
(four or five per day) is clogging my registry and making Outlook Express
unstable and slow.

Poco is good in a lot of ways, but it's slow when dealing with large
mailbases, like mine. (30,000 messages.) I try to nuke stuff I don't need
anymore, but there's still a lot there, and it doesn't cope with large
mailboxes (like Sent Items) very well. I guess this is motivation to shovel
out the mailbase, just as we're shoveling out the house right now, but
shoveling out the mailbase, while easier on the muscles, doesn't take
any less time.

On the spam front, what we need most right now is for mail clients to
strip out or otherwise ignore HTML comments when filtering mail. The latest
spammer scam is to insert HTML comments full of random gibberish every
few characters in any message text, typically in the opt-out (hah!) instructions.
(The main body of spam these days is almost invariably an image downloaded
from a server, and I'm trying to figure out how to discriminate against
messages that download images from elsewhere.) Neither Poco nor Outlook
Express ignore HTML comments, and this is making it much more difficult
to nuke things based on text filtering.

POPFile is basically worthless, and I've uninstalled it. A false positive
per day is unacceptable, especially on messages with no conceivable resemblance
to junk mail.

March 29, 2003:

While getting to the bottom of the pile out
in the garage, I discovered something forgotten and wonderful: A trove
of over a hundred NOS (New Old Stock) boxed inductors from the 40's, 50's
and early 60's, from J. W. Miller, Meissner, and other famous firms from
the glory days of radio. I bought them about ten years ago from an old
chap at a hamfest, and the box he handed them to me in was crumbling to
dust. So I moved them into an empty PC Techniques magazine box,
circa 1993, and then put them on the shelf. I got busy with other things
and forgot about them, and because they were in a magazine box I thought
they were magazines...until this afternoon.

I have always wanted to build a tube-type shortwave superhet receiver but
never have, and with the IF cans in the box, I now have a fighting chance.
Won't be for awhile, but the lesson is clear: Label your stuff! Especially
if you have stuff on the scale that I do!

March 27, 2003:

If I have any Poco Mail users among my readership,
listen up: Here's my junksender.txt
file, which has hundreds of known spammer domains, each individually discerned.
(I.e., I was careful not to include any of the free email services, which
are much beloved by the chickenboners.) And speaking of which, I can only
assume that the tanked economy is responsible for the recent exposion
of chickenboner activity, testified to by the great many incompetent spams
I'm gettingthese people are desperate, dumb, and not reading the
doc.

My list of blocked senders will filter out most of the "professional"
spammers, who acquire and use their own domains. You'll still have to
filter on distinctive phrases in the text to root out the chickenboners.
Fortunately, this gets easier as time goes on: M0rtgage, p3nis, F.R.E.E
and so on are not things you generally see in real email.

We're heading into the packing endgame here...it's been 13 years since we
last threw everything we owned onto a truck, and we've forgotten a lot of
things, like...how do you pack ties? (And for people who have seen my scrap
pile, I must clarify: I mean neckties, not railroad ties, which stack
quite neatly in a moving van, and don't wrinkle...)

March 26, 2003:

The great enemy we face in our modern era may
not be socialism, or communism, or globalization, or even terrorism, but
cynicism. I think the reason that Europe hates us so much (now that they're
finally coming out and saying it to our faces) is that they're cynical
and we're not. (At least those of us who aren't members of the bicoastal
intellectual elite.) Cynicism, of course, is the intellectual fallacy
that nothing really matters, and the one thing that drives cynics completely
batshit is knowing that somewhere, somebody thinks that certain things
do matter. The cynics brand us as sentimental cornballs, but the
truth is that as best I can tell, we're happy, and they're not.

A friend of mine (who for fear of the RIAA asked to remain nameless)
sent me a copy of a song by Billy Dean: "Once in a While." It's
gentle country, and while I dare not post the MP3, you can find the lyrics
here.
Cornball that I am and have always been, I will freely admit that it brought
tears to my eyes. Consider the bridge, which Billy sings with forceful
conviction:

That's why we call them heroes.
That's why we know their names,
And once you've heard their stories,
You're never quite the same.

That's why we call them heroes.
The best thing they ever do,
Is to point to the best in us all,
And say: "If I can, you can too."

Heroes don't have to be warriors. They don't have to be loud, or famous,
or even especially visible. They cannot, however, be cowards or phonies,
which is the two-horned brand I burn into the hides of cynics everywhere:
We know you're not strong enough to face the world, and dodge the need
to consider ultimate questions with a withering sneer. You're still fighting.

We've already won.

March 25, 2003:

Where
were all these antiwar protesters when Clinton sent troops into Bosnia?
Just wondering, heh.

March 23, 2003:

The Big Truck comes in only 9 days, so my entries
here may get shorter and sparser for awhile, especially starting tomorrow.
We have about 250 boxes packed, but the easy stuff is done, and now it's
a question of trying to decide what you can pack and still live in the
house for another week. The place is a tremendous mess, with open boxes
arranged around me in a circle while I empty shelves, my desk, and various
storage cubbies, like behind my desk under the window, where the dust
was an inch deep atop old Compaq keyboards and other stuff I hadn't thought
about since 1997.

So bear with me if I get a little quiet for awhile.

March 22, 2003:

I downloaded the latest release of PocoMail
and decided to give it another go. My copy of Outlook Express has begun
to get unstable, probably due to the immense number of blacklisted domains
that the idiot thing insists on storing in the registry. Poco rubbed me
the wrong way last April when I tried it out, (although to be honest I
don't quite recall what the killer problem was) and I uninstalled it and
more or less forgot about it.

But I really need a better mail client than OE. So I've got the newest
Poco running in parallel with OE, downloading messages without removing
them from the server, with OE still maintaining my primary mailbase. Poco
imported all 30,000 messages in the mailbase without much trouble. It
can't, alas, import blocked senders, so I'm bringing them over from OE
via cut'n'paste, a few at a time as I find time. (You can download what
I have so far of blocked senders, in text file format, here.
I cringe to recall it, but what's there is less than half of what's
still in my damned registry!) Once I have Poco's spam filters working
acceptably, there's no particular reason to keep on with OE, and I will
nuke it gladly.

On a lark I installed Kazaa and went looking for other Poco users' junksender.txt
files, but didn't find any. If I had, I would have cobbled up a simple
text merge program in Delphi. I may still do that, so if any of you have
a PocoMail junksender.txt you'd like to share, please send it along. Once
I have my full blacklist in Poco format I'll post it. About 80% of the
spam I get is from obvious spammer domains (things like dailydealdepot.com
and titty-mail.com) and my blacklist is my best antispam weapon at the
moment, and most of the chickenboners can be caught by searching for their
increasingly idiosyncratic spellings of things like F.R.E.E. and m0rtgage.

One interesting feature a mail client should have is the ability to check
a message being sent to be sure it doesn't trigger the client's own spam
filters. The filters are there; it should be just a check box somewhere
to apply spam filtering to each message before it's sent, so I won't by
mistake include something that other people are likely to be filtering
for.

March 21, 2003:

Setting side for now the issue of whether the
war is a good idea or not, let's talk about the protests popping up in
biggish cities around the country. What exactly are they trying to accomplish?
If they're trying to bring the undecided around to their point of view,
they're going about it most peculiarly. Jamming public transit with human
barricades at the end of the day when tired and hungry workers are just
trying to get home is not the way to make points with anyone. Blocking
access to Joe's Bagel Shop is not a strike at Corporate America or anything
else except poor Joe, who may not actually have been a conservative before
he saw the Left trying to drive him out of business. I saw a news clip
of protesters somewhere screaming abuse at police, who stood there stolidly
without cracking heads or even arresting anybody.

I was most amused that the generally liberal (and sometimes screamingly
so) members of the Plastic Web aggregator were
not sympathetic. And boy, if you're pissing off your own people, then
ya gotta wonder what in hell is going on.

A clue may lie in a
whimsical but highly articulate cartoon strip by Peter Bagge, which
is so true it's doubly funny. (Remember, I actually marched on Washington
over Vietnam with a million other longhairs back in 1971, so I've seen
some of this stuff when it was first-run and still know a fair number
of those who marched with me.) If Bagge's insights are true (and I think
they are) it means that most of these people don't care a whit about the
war at all. It's about partisanship, and pet causes (most of which have
nothing to do with war or peace) and kids looking for excuses to cut class.

Do the protesters have any idea how badly they're painting the (worthy)
idea of peace activism? Can they fathom how many people they're pissing
off and driving away from the cause? Democrats keep whining that the Republicans
are cheating to get in power and stay there; perhaps the Dems need to crack
their whips over some of their left wing, who are the best advertisement
for the Republican party that ever was, and better PR than the often-dimwitted
Republicans could ever devise for themselves.

March 20, 2003:

A special Darwin Award for Clueless Artists
should be issued to the Dixie Chicks, who were working a European audience
recently and figured that slandering America (and of course, George W.
Bush) always plays well abroad. What they forgot is that the country-western
music crowd is, for the most part, made up of Red People, who voted for
George Bush and for the most part support his policies. In subsequent
weeks, country stations all over the country pulled all Chicks music from
their playlists and invited enraged listeners to bring their Chicks CDs
and branded merchandise to parking lots where they could be burned, bashed
with sledge hammers, run over by tractors, and otherwise desecrated.

Maybe it'll all blow over, but maybe not. Out in Red Country, people still
refer to Jane Fonda as Hanoi Jane after 35 years. Country has a long memory.
Lesson 1: Know your market, heh. Maybe they could start doing Streisand
covers.

March 19, 2003:

Our deadline for Saddam to get out of town has
just passed as I write this, so across the country people are pouring
chips into bowls in front of the TV and stocking the fridge with cold
beers and getting ready to watch another good war.

Are you sick yet? So am I. I'm sick of the politics and the rhetoric
on both sides. I'm sick of the tenor of the antiwar protest, which is
way more about hating George Bush and the Republicans than about
all the Iraqis who are going to die in this thing. A few Americans and
British will probably also die, but I don't think Iraq fully understands
what it's up against, and I don't think most ordinary Americans do either.
If this war happens (and it isn't started until it starts) it will be
a rout.

I'm sick of France claiming the high ground, when it's all about oil
to them too, and how they'd rather buy it from a dictator who gasses his
own people than from an American puppet regime.

I'm sick of the lack of ideas from the peace movement. OK, peace. Tell
me how. Don't tell me how much you hate Bush. We know that. Tell
us how to get to peace from where we areoh, and maybe tell us how
to keep Hussein from killing his own citizens by the tens or hundreds
of thousands. That's gotta be worth something too, right?

I'm basically sick of the whole damned thing. I lost half of last night's
sleep tossing around for being sick of it all. I don't want it to start,
but if it has to start, for God's sake (truly) let it be over quickly.

March 18, 2003:

I borrowed a fascinating book from my good friend
Bishop Elijah of the Old Catholic Church, now retired in Roseville, California.
It's a history of the Polish National Catholic Church, to which our little
Phoenix Old Catholic community belonged before we broke with them over
their increasing conservatism and inexplicable (well, OK, maybe a little
explicable) passion to reunite with Rome while a Polish pope was still
running the place. The book is The Origin and Growth of the Polish
National Catholic Church by the Rev. Stephen Wlodarski. I expected
history and got it; what I had not expected was in the appendices, where
the full statement of faith of the PNCC was reproduced. Of particular
interest to me was Point VII of the Eleven Great Principles of the PNCC:
On Eternal Punishment. It's too big to
place inline here, but read it if you're the least bit interested in Catholicism.

The gist: The founders of the PNCC were universalists! I'd heard
rumors to that effect, but this was the first time I'd seen it all laid
out, and as far as I know it's unique in the Catholic world. The document
(about 1000 words) is a truly beautiful thing, and reflects the well-known
Polish reliance on progress through hard work. This is the antithesis
of conventional Protestant belief (i.e., not "do" but "done")
and one answer at least to a question I rarely get anyone in the Catholic
community to answer for me: To what extent do we cooperate in our own
salvation?

The PNCC does not promise an easy journey to the Beatific Vision, but at
least they promise a journey, and not some kind of diabolical Monopoly game
with infinite stakes and loaded dice. Perhaps it's all metaphorical; truly,
how can we explain or describe what path may lie beyond death? On the other
hand, it's the sort of thing that ordinary people can understand, and something
I wish I had known about in time to gently defuse my mother's lifelong terror
of being tossed into Hell on a technicality.

March 17, 2003:

Wow. I knew that Pete's LX200GPS was a heavily
computerized device, but just how computerized wasn't clear until
Pete and I set it up last night and gave it a spin. We didn't have much
time. The weather's been bad, but late yesterday afternoon the skies cleared
up to some extent and we decided to set it up.

It was eerie. We put the scope on its monster tripod, powered it up,
and told it to go align itself. It first identified its location in space-time
with its built-in GPS receiver, and then slewed to where it thought Sirius
was. Came real closeand Pete centered the star in the eyepiece
and pressed Enter. It then slewed majestically across the sky to Dubhe,
and we did the same. After that, we simply selected planets and stellar
objects from the list stored in its computer, and the scope hummed around
and centered them in the eyepiece for us. We saw Jupiter, Saturn, several
Messier objects, and a couple of close doubles before the clouds closed
in and we saw lightning in the distance. Total observing time: 40 minutes.
We spent no time looking for things, and all that time looking
at them. Needless to say, it's not quite the same with my home-made
10" Newtonian, as good a scope as it is.

It's a good thing the Meade was easy to take down, because a storm roared
in not long after, and we had one of the wildest cloudbursts I've seen
since the madness of 1993. An immense quantity of hail came down, and
I had hail an inch deep on my front porch.

It wasn't really enough time to decide how much I care for the "go-to"
telescope concept. There was a nearly full moon, so it wasn't a good night
to look for faint deep sky objects, and we spent most of our time gasping
at Jupiter and Saturn, which were spectacular. We tried to control the scope
with Cartes du Ciel (see yesterday's entry) but the serial port wouldn't
talk to the scope and we had no time to troubleshoot once we saw lightning
in the west. As a first impression it was terrific. I can't help but think
that instruments like the Meade will make telescope making as a hobby mostly
extinct, just as low-cost modern amateur transceivers have made the hobby
of building radios mostly extinct. That's a problem, especially in terms
of helping young people understand how all this works, but for old guys
with more money than time, yikes! There's nothing like it anywhere.

March 16, 2003:

The move is making me crazy, but I decided to
take a break for a couple of days while my old Lane Tech Astronomical
Society friend Pete Albrecht drove out from LA with his new Meade LX200GPS
telescope. (See my entry for January 2, 2003 for a photo of the scope,
though not Pete's.) We're going to set it up today if it clears, though
a peek out the window right now shows light drizzle.

What Pete showed me last night, however, was dazzling: A completely free
software package called Cartes
Du Ciel (that's "Sky Charts" in the Freedom language) by
a Swiss chap named Patrick Chevalley. It's by far the best star atlas
program I've ever used, and they don't get any cheaper, heh. It allows
you to install star charts as they become available. We installed the
Tycho charts, which gives us stars down to about 12th magnitude, which
is the limit for Pete's scope, and somewhat beyond the limit for mine.
It displays constellation figures (if you want them; they're handy for
orientation, especially with everything down to mag 12 on your screen!)
and Milky Way boundaries. You right-click on an object to identify it
and display its properties (coordinates, magnitude, catalog number, etc.)
and can control the size of the field displayed.

It will not only show you where the planets are, but also where the planets'
moons are! I was most impressed with being able to see the location of
Phobos and Deimos, which I've never seen "in person" through
a scope. (Having 12th-mag stars on the chart would be handy in a Phobos
and Deimos hunt!)

The program has an option to allow control of a Meade "go-to"
scope through a serial port. Click onm an object, and the scope will go
there. We're going to install it on my laptop and give that a shot tonight.
I don't have the time to say a whole lot more about it right now, but if
you have any least interest in the night sky (and especially if you have
kids at home) go get it and try it. The download is 16 MB, but trust me,
it's worth it!

March 15, 2003:

Moving
company estimates are coming in, and they're remarkably consistent in
their predictions of the weight of our aggregate household goods: 25,000
pounds. Knocking off about 5,000 pounds' worth of things that don't need
packing (primarily furniture and my 1,000-pound engine lathe) Carol reminded
me today that once we're done packing I will have dumped over ten tons
of stuff into boxes. We're well past 200 packed boxes now, and will probably
go to 250, maybe 275.

I have a system. Every box gets a 2" X 4" label with a room
code on it: BR1, BR2, MBR, KIT, GAR, DIN, and BAS. Anything bound for
the basement (BAS) gets an additional label, color-coded for one of four
zones carved out in the cavernous basement:

(White labels in the photo above are simply address labels, so that no box
will be without our address.) We've created signs with each of the room
codes on them, and colored sheets of paper to tape to the basement walls
where we want the movers to drop the boxes. If all goes well, we should
never be entirely unable to zero in on a specific box among the many.

March 14, 2003:

Several people sent me notice in the last day
and a half of the liquidation of Peer Information, parent company of geektome
specialist Wrox Press, design book house Friends of ED, and Glasshaus,
a UK publisher of Web design books. I'm not familiar with Glasshaus, but
Wrox has been something of a phenom since about 1993. They began by publishing
books by Russian authors, often with marginal translation and terrible
editing, but over time they became a serious force and published a lot
of really good books, several of which are on my shelf (well, OK, in boxes,
like everything else) and will remain with me for a long time.

The fate that befell Wrox tracked that which befell Coriolis to some
extent. Wrox, like Coriolis, had the problem of what to publish once their
list got big and they needed to publish 100+ books a year. We tried
to go horizontal, into other areas, while Wrox went vertical, and published
books of such phenomenal technical narrowness that maybe 200 people in
the world might be passionately interested in them. You can't do that
forever, and once the publishing depression hit, it hit them hard. (As
my friends know too well, Coriolis had other problems that I don't say
much about in print.) Friends of ED came out of nowhere with a tremendous
budget, publishing good but costly-to-produce books on graphics design.
They took a lot of market share from Coriolis' Creative Professionals
line, and we lost a lot of sleep trying to decide how to compete with
them.

Wrox was very popular in programmer circles, and made its authors stars
by putting their pictures on their unmistakable fire-engine red covers.
Not long before the end, I was working to design a new series of technical
books allowing us to compete with Wrox on similar terms, but Coriolis
sank before I could sign the first title in the series.

Book publishing is in a lousy place right now. Small presses struggle in
obscurity, mid-size houses like Wrox are teetering on the edge before tumbling
out of sight, and the monster conglomerates are still bleeding worthless
titles into the marketplace, probably in an effort to kill everybody else
off before they're forced to quit the business themselves. Keith and I designed
Paraglyph to have the lowest cost structure possible, but more important
than that, we will never publish books for books' sake. Every title has
to make sense. The lessons of Coriolis and Wrox are not lost on us.

March 13, 2003:

Yesterday's post generated a flurry of interest
fairly quickly. Nobody stood up to defend tantrait's one of those
things, I'd guess, that people talk about a lot more than they actually
dobut some intriguing thoughts came in on celibacy.

Reader Jason Kaczor suggested that young nerds have their legendary focus
because they're celibate, and I suppose that's possible, but there are
other explanations. Young nerds (like young people of any category) simply
have less to focus on, and more time to focus on what they choose to do.
I recall having intense focus when I was a teenager (and celibate, which
at that time we called "lonesome and hard-up") and spent much
time banging out loopy SF stories on my Underwood and building radios
and telescopes. Once I got a girlfriend I spent somewhat less time in
my mother's basement, and once I met Carol (at 17) I started my long march
to full humanity in earnest.

Someone who asked not to be quoted by name suggested that among modern,
secular liberals, celibacy is what you do to take a break from frantic
promiscuity. Yes, that would be funny if it weren't so sad.

My good friend Bishop Elijah (a retired Old Catholic bishop and in my
view the finest thinker the Old Catholics have at this point in time)
expressed some discontent with my blanket condemnation of celibacy, and
I suppose I'll dig myself a little deeper and clarify my thoughts on the
subject before I head back out to continue shoveling loose radio parts
into boxes in the garage.

The problems I have with celibacy are tied up with the Catholic Church,
for the most part (I don't do "Eastern spirituality") and are
these:

The majority of celibates are celibate against their will, or at
least against their better judgment. Catholic bishops and cardinals
may support the lifestyle, sometimes reluctantly; most rank-and-file
priests would dump it in a heartbeat. (Many havegreat numbers
of Old Catholic priests are ex-Romans.)

The Catholic Church recruits its priests from the ranks of idealistic
and often immature young men sometimes as young as 14, long before they
truly understand the nature of their own humanity. They promise away
what they never knew they had, and not all have the strength to break
free of their loneliness once the fraud becomes obvious. The priests
in our parish lobbied hard for "vocations" among us eighth
graders, and I ate their cookies but I knew it was a scam and they knew
I knew. (I was their last choice to serve wedding Masses and didn't
get the tips that my less suspicious friends did.) My practical suggestion:
No celibate should ever be a virgin.

Celibacy, like all extremes of asceticism, is an invitation to spiritual
pride. In other words, far too many celibates are pretty damned pleased
with themselves for the depth and breadth of their sacrifice. My practical
suggestion: Celibacy should be a deep and heartkept secret. Those
who are celibate should never talk about it! In fact, celibates
should pair off, man and woman, and pretend to be married. (They would
then understand the true nature of what they have foresworn!)

Institutionalized celibacy has an affinity for Manichaeism. Most of
what is wrong with Eastern Orthodoxy (which in its defence understands
many things better than Roman Catholicism) has its roots in Mt. Athos.
Orthodox bishops must be monastics, and celibate, and this colors their
attitudes toward women, marriage, the laity, and the physical world.
If I were to found an independent Catholic jurisdiction, I would insist
that bishops be married before their consecration. No individual should
be granted the fullness of the priesthood without experiencing the fullness
of humanity, and no individual should counsel, teach, or shrive the
married without having been married him or herself.

I guess that's enough grumpiness for one evening. Most of what is wrong
with Christianity these days is, in fact, Manichaeism, and Manichaeism is
the great challenge facing those of us who would like to see religion regain
the respect it once had.

March 12, 2003:

I was shoveling out old magazines from the corner
of my office (they collect like dust mice) when I happend across a few
issues of What Is Enlightenment?, an expensive semiannual journal
on Eastern spirituality that I picked up here and there in the midlate
90s, while I was casting about for a spiritual path. Issue 13 was the
last one I bought, and now I recall why: The cover theme is "Sex
and Spirituality," and it was one of the most depressing things I
ever read. One major article was about celibacy, and how great it was.
The other was about tantra, and how great it was.

Celibacy in the eastern view is about redirecting your sexual energy
to other things, such as the things that Ken
Wilber writes about but no one but he can understand. (I do like his
hairdo, though.) I've read quite enough about celibacy while researching
the history of Christianity to know that what it mostly did was redirect
men's sexual energy toward making them into jerks, a problem we're still
not shut of.

Tantra, now...I admit I don't know much about it, but I wonder if the
people who wrote the articles in that magazine had any idea how offputting
their descriptions were. At best it comes across as a kind of pompous
sandalwood-flavored mutual masturbation, and at worst an exercise in Eastern
femdom fetish work. Amidst much talk of energy and chakras and goddesses
and peak experience and such, I found no least trace of any mention of
love, or even affection, let alone committment.

It's characteristic of the sense I get for Eastern spirituality generally:
Fatalistic selfishness that yearns for extinction. Where's love in this
picture? Or destiny? Where is there any sense that the individual even
matters? Am I the only one this seems to bother?

Then again, I'm exhausted. Maybe I'll take another look in the morning.

Or maybe not.

March 11, 2003:

It's
here. It's real. Three cartons of my newest book (see my entry for Februrary
11, 2003) landed on the doorstep a few hours ago. Boy, this has been a long
roadeven though it was shorter than the road to most of my other books.
(Only Turbo Pascal Solutions, which I wrote in ten blistering weeks,
made it to reality faster.) Now I need to get review copies out to key people,
start begging Amazon reviews, and setting up presentations to promote it.
I'll be taking a day or two off from packing the garage to do some marketing.
What a rush.

March 10, 2003:

Perhaps the way out of the spam problem is to
create technology to provide a sort of bonded mailing house in the electronic
world. Way back when we were promoting PC Techniques and Visual
Developer, we would rent mailing lists from companies and other publications
and send them promo pieces for our magazine. However, we would never see
the actual names and addresses to which we were mailing. We would send
our promo pieces to a bonded mailing house, and the list owners would
send their lists to the same bonded mailing house. The mailing house would
label and mail our promo pieces and send us the bill.

This time-honored system has worked pretty well in the print publications
world for a lot of years. In print, the emphasis is on keeping the mailing
list out of the hands of people who wish to mail to it. On the Internet,
it would be different: a platform for opt-out that would prevent "opt-out"
from being nothing more than a confirmation of a "live" email
address, and an invitation for more spam. The bonded emailing house would
purge email addresses on a national "do not email" list from
lists of emails sent to it from spammers. It would also charge spammers
on a per-piece basis to send email messages from the mailing house's domain.
The whole thing would be sanctioned by law, in that it would be a misdemeanor
to send commercial email to anyone who has registered an address in the
national "do not mail" list. Spammers would enter a legal "safe
haven" by using the emailing house instead of sending mail directly.
If mistakes were made by the emailing house, the house would take the
hits for penalties, not the spammers. Because the "do not mail"
list would not be made available to anyone but the various bonded emailing
houses (who would pay for the privilege) the "do not mail" list
could not be used as a source for more "virgin" addresses by
unscrupulous spammers. (Are there any other kind? Not anymore.)

The per-piece charge need not be high to kill indiscriminate spamnot
even a penny per. Spam needs to go out by the millions to make any money
at all, so people publishing a legitimate newsletter to five or six thousand
people would pay fifty or sixty bucks, which isn't punishing, and might
serve to improve the quality of the content.

Such a system wouldn't be perfect, and would depend to a great extent on
legal enforcement, but if enforced, it could work.

March 7, 2003:

I'm
getting behind in my packing. I'll be quiet for a couple of days while I
get more of the garage into boxes. This is hard work.

March 6, 2003:

We
got our first weight estimate/quote in from a moving company. 23,000 pounds!
How could we possibly have 23,000 pounds of stuff? (I admit, having an 1100-pound
engine lathe on a metal bench doesn't help.) Then Carol dug around in her
files and discovered that when we moved here from California, our stuff
weighed in at 22,300 pounds. So we've acquired only 700 pounds of stuff
since then. We hope. (Yes, you can laugh. It's OK.)

March 5, 2003:

Spammers have clearly discerned the threat from
Bayesian filters, and have begun to respond. I got a puzzling message
today, which consisted of a typical bitmap offering cheap mortages, surrounded
by text that was calculated to sound like a legitimate business or personal
message: "What is it that you people do at this company?" and, much more
peculiarly, "Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some
strange usage of the word "safe" that I wasn't previously aware of."
(The quotes were in the spam and are not my addition.)

Good try, but it didn't work: POPFile nabbed it anyway, though it was less
than a 1.000 probability. I'll be watching for more of the same. POPFile,
alas, continues to throw me false positives on an almost daily basis, including
(most recently) a sizeable message about obscure Celtic saints that I cannot
imagine the program would mistake for spam. I have no idea what its
problem is, but I see that a new release is available and will upgrade as
soon as I can slow down enough to get it done.

March 4, 2003:

In
continuing to dig down to the bottoms of our many junk drawers, lots of
oddments have surfaced that I haven't seen in awhile. A nice clean copy
of my "I do so homebrew!" QSL card turned up yesterday.
I ran out of them while we were still in California and never reprinted
it, and used generic QSLs for whatever radio work I've done while here
in Arizona. SF persons may recognize the artist: Hugo-award winning fan
artist Phil Foglio, with whom I was an undergraduate at DePaul University
in the early 1970s.

I'm in dire need of a new QSL, and if I can find Phil's original art I'll
put one together. I suspect that I won't change my call again (K7JPD gave
me my initials) even when we move to Colorado, where callsigns use 0 instead
of 7, so once made it's made for good. The cartoon made me laughit
reminds me of what I'm doing in the garage right now: Sweeping loose electronic
parts into a "hell box" which I will have to sort someday in Colorado.
Someday, sigh. When will I be making radios again? Who knows?

March 3, 2003:

Reader
Ben Sawyer sent me a link to a
photo of a USB toothbrush. He didn't have an explanation and didn't
offer one, and as the site is in Japanese it was no help. My guess is that
it's simply a clever way to use the battery in your laptop to power your
dentail hygiene, and only the Japanese would have thought of it. (USB ports
can source as much as half an ampway more than a toothbrush requires.)
If anyone can offer additional insights (or verify my guess) I'd be grateful.

March 2, 2003:

The spam problem has gotten so bad that even
the Direct Marketing Associationfor years now the biggest stumbling
block to meaningful spam regulationhas gotten on board. The DMA
clings to their idiotic contention that opt-out is viable, but the fact
that they see the steamroller coming is an indicator of how bad things
have gotten.

Many people I've spoken to endorse the legislative solution proposed
repeatedly over the past several years: A requirement that commercial
bulk emailers add a specified textual phrase to every message, indicating
that it's commercial email. Such labeling is required on various sorts
of things in the US, most visibly on food packaged for commercial sale.

This would kill a lot of spam spam stone dead, since virtually all ISPs
would gleefully nuke anything with the mandated label before it ever got
to consumers. The problematic part is that some commercial email is in
fact useful and desired. I requested and receive two ad-supported Web
aggregators that both looked like spam to POPFile before I taught it otherwise.
I have occasionally (less often recently for fear of the sharing of email
address lists) requested information on products via email. Such things
should remain at the option of consumers, and ISP-based spam filters would
make them impossible. Worse, the chickenboners and other small-time spammers
would largely ignore the labeling law, so we'd lose a lot of newsletters,
aggregators, and requested product information, yet still be bombarded
by invitations to buy HGH, viagra, toy hovercraft, and photos of nasty
sluts.

As usual, the devil is in the details. We could forbid ISPs from filtering
spam (thus leaving the choice to filter or not filter to individual consumers)
but unless we could get spam-label filtering onto virtually every email
client in the country, spam would still be economically viable and would
continue to overwhelm the Net. Charging for email by the piece is mostly
absurdI can't see why people continue to think it would work, nor
how it could be enforced in the absence of a total Federal takeover of the
Internet. The effect spam is having on the Internet infrastructure is mostly
invisible to end users, but it's a problem, as related vividly here.
Sooner or later the government will step in, and irrespective of what they
do, it won't workand will consolidate power in places we'd probably
not want it consolidated.

March 1, 2003:

Before
we went to Colorado, we had dinner with Bill and Esther Schindler, and
were trading stories of those bad old 50's draggy momentsand I'm
not talking about the Eisenhower era, either. Bill strongly recommended
a nonprescription B vitamin supplement that you squirt under your tongue
and let sit there for a minute or two while it leaks through into the
veins under your tongue.

I'm ordinarily skeptical of such things, but the stuff was reasonably
cheap, and Bill's no captious New Ager. So for the past two weeks I've
been squirting bright orange goo under my tongue every morning.

Yikes. I haven't felt like this since I was in my thirties. That's
the whole point: You apparently begin to lose the ability to make this
stuff internally after age 40 or so, and when the deficiency gets bad
enough they call it pernicious anemia. I'm thunderstruck at how easily
I get out of bed, and how vigorously I can apply myself, sometimes until
ten at night. Carol was watching me pack boxes earlier today, and she
started laughing. "You look like somebody wound your spring up too
tight," she said.

Wow. Oddly, it didn't have quite the same magical effect on her, but different
people have different needs, and if you don't lack it, adding more won't
help. However, if you do lack it, zoom! The stuff is available at
Hi-Health and most other health food and vitamin places. It's called BTotal,
from Sublingual Products, and I can't find a Web site for the vendor, but
it's all over the Web. About $9 for two one-ounce dispensers like the one
shown above. Energetically recommended!